The Worry of Working Around the Cluck

And some exciting announcements:

Before I start:

• I’ll be live at the Hudson Farmer’s Market this Saturday 5/10 from 9-1! Come say hi!

• I’ll be in conversation with the inimitable Amy Chaplin later on Saturday 5/10 from 2,30-4! Tickets and info here.

• Tada! The cover, by the amazing Anna Brones, of Feast on Your Life, out 12/2/25.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming:

Dear Tamar:

As a family, we’ve embraced many versions of "chicken and rice." The children will eat it, the adults are happy with it. Even our dog likes chicken and rice. As the kids say: I'm the problem, it's me. I'm tired of the varieties of chicken and rice that I have on rotation. We do grilled teriyaki chicken and rice, an arroz con pollo type thing in a pan, and fried rice with leftover chicken. How can I break up the monotony? Or, is this my problem to solve with a good condiment game?

-Working Around the Cluck

Dear Working Around the Cluck,

It may be because I’m releasing Feast on Your Life in December (I’ll stop including links, but I so love the cover…) but in your letter, I heard hints of a children’s book; I sensed unexplored narrative in “even our dog likes chicken and rice.” I’m seeing Bread and Jam for Francis meets Chicken Soup with Rice.

This put me in mind of children’s books that follow the alphabet. As do many of my favorite grown-up books. What food writer doesn’t wish they were first to the conceit of An Alphabet for Gourmets? (And who is deluded enough to imagine they’d have done as good a job?) What lover of murder mysteries doesn’t yearn to have written The ABC Murders while suspecting they couldn’t have, even with Agatha Christie’s great title…

I’ve relayed the following story in interviews as one of high-jinx: I relied on the alphabet to write my last book. My goal was to offer recipes for every leftover imaginable. I would wake up in cold sweats in the middle of the night, thinking: “fufu!” or “rodbetssallad!” To address the problem, I decided to approach the world alphabetically. I made 26 spreadsheets, labeled A-Z, and worked with a research assistant to comb through dozens of cookbook and websites looking for foods beginning with each letter. On a given Monday, my to-do list might say “Foods that start with the letter Q.”

Was it a fool’s errand? Absolutely. Neither “fufu” or “rodbetssallad”—nor quince nor quahog—made the final cut. But the alphabet helped. In musing on the children’s-book quality of your round-the-cluck work, I found myself turning to the principle again. “Adobo” revealed itself immediately, and then “adobo chicken with rice,” and then, when I thought of “arroz,” “arroz caldo,” since you already have “arroz con pollo” in your repertoire. Remembering how long it takes to make it though 26 letters, I moved on to “B” and landed on "biryani.” “C” led me to “chicken congee;” “D” to Burmese “dan bauk chicken,” and “E,” to an “Egyptian chicken rice” (though the recipe provided is more labor intensive than I would endeavor, and it’s more “Egyptian-influenced” than it is a national dish.) Under “F” there’s “fricassee” served on white rice, and “G” “Guam-Style chicken with rice.” And for “H,” you’ll certainly want to remember “Hainan chicken rice,” which is magical, and even more so because such depth of flavor is produced within such a limited color palate—the finished dish is basically white.

For “I,”…I choose to stop imposing my fowl-inflected abecedarium on you. But I invite you to adapt my method, or choose another to make your own. Take down three cookbooks at random and look in each index under “chicken,” and under “rice,” and see if you turn up a variation. As the weather warms, decide to keep the chicken-and-rice part of the meal constant, and make a new salsa or drizzling sauce every week. (I made Salsa Doña again yesterday. It remains perfect.)

Dear cook, I choose the ABC’s. Any organizing principle helps. I loathe children’s books with over-wrought morals, but your book on chicken and rice has one: in a world teeming with wonderful things beloved by children and grown ups and even dogs, creativity is often best nourished by constraints, which can keep humans and canines from working around the cluck.